Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 June 1896 — The Old Idea of Electricity. [ARTICLE]

The Old Idea of Electricity.

When people speak to-day of the “electric fluid’’ and the “electric juloe,” they ai'b only carrying out the idea, common a generation ago, that electricity was not only a fluid, but a liquid, which flowejl from point to point as water flows. That, at any rate, was the theory held by one good old lady. This story is told by an operator who now "works” one of the press wires in New York: I learned telegraphy, as I suppose most boys do, by setting up a “sounder” at home. I had it on a shelf by the kitchen window. The battery stood in a corner under a table. The wires from the battery to the sounder were full of kinks, as they always are, to take up the slack wire without cutting it. .One day thq sounder would not work at all, and I got out of patience. Then my good old grandmother, who had been watching me, said: “John Henry, you let me get nt it a minute. I'll make it go, if there’s any go to it.” She put on her big silver-bowed ape? taeles and looked it all over. Then she crawled under the table—forgetting all about her rheumatism—and carefully straightened out all the kinks and loops in the wires. Such a satisfied smile as she wore when she got up! “There, John Henry,'.’ she said,. ‘I don't believe but what it will work all right now. You try it and see. You’ hadn’t ought to expect that electric fluid to run through anything so crooked as them wires was.” The funny part of the story it that "it did work all right.” In straightening the wires the old lady had probably pulled one of them a little uny through the zinc l in the battery, and so had ipade the connection: but she insisted that all that wits necessary was to get the kinks out of the wires.